There is something oddly satisfying in LeBron James’ decision to return to Cleveland. And it has nothing to do with basketball.

I’m not a huge NBA fan aside from my yearly fantasy that the upcoming year will be the one the Wizards return to the glory of an NBA title I witnessed when I was a senior at Virginia Tech back in 1978. Usually that fantasy is quickly quashed before we open Christmas presents, although this year it extended into spring before suffering its annual ugly demise.

But you can’t ignore LeBron James. He is this generation’s Michael Jordan, so when he’s on TV, I watch. When there are massive features done on him, I read. I can’t say I believe a lot of what I read, because these are the days of the massive PR spin machines. Back when I started out in journalism, a feature involved you interviewing an athlete. These were the days immediately after Watergate, so the notion any entity would blatantly try to muzzle the media message was not looked kindly upon, particularly in sports.

A memorial service will be held tonight at Broad Run High School to remember former Spartan coach Adam Fortune. The event will begin at 7:30 PM.

Another memorial service will take place on Sunday, July 13 at the Stauffer Funeral home in Frederick, MD from 4 PM until 7 PM. The address for Stauffer Funeral Home is 1621 Opossum Town Pike, Frederick, MD 21702.

His funeral will be the next day at 11 AM on Monday July 14 with a reception to follow. The funeral service will be at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. The address for St. Paul’s is 51 South Main Street, Smithsburg, MD 21783.

Austin Vantrease, the 23-year-old who was convicted of malicious assault in a 2009 incident that left former Broad Run student Ryan Diviney in a coma, has been granted parole.

The state parole board in West Virginia reached that decision earlier today. Diviney was a student at West Virginia University when the incident occurred, and Vantrease had been serving a 2 to 10 year sentence for malicious assault at the St. Marys Correctional Center in St. Marys, WV.

He had served 4 years of that sentence, and was granted “deferred parole” today. According to the Dominion Post, he will be released within the next 90 days.

They say that life is a journey, and that it's not so much about reaching the finish line as it is the number of people's lives you touch along the way. Judging from a quick look at Twitter this morning, Adam Fortune was an incredible man, as these are just a sampling of all the comments posted since last night:

Former Briar Woods standout Alex Carter continues the upward trajectory of his football career, as he was named Monday to the watch list for the Bednarik Award, given annually to the nation’s top defensive player.

There are 76 players named to the watch list, which theoretically means Carter is among the best defensive players in the country and a lock to be drafted by an NFL team in 2015. Semifinalists will be announced Nov. 3, while the three finalists will be revealed on Nov. 24. The winner will be announced as part of the Home Depot College Football Awards Show held on Dec. 11.

Carter, a junior psychology major at Stanford, has earned All-Pac-12 honorable mention honors in each of his first two seasons since assuming a starting role at cornerback for the last eight games of his freshman season. Last year Carter started all 13 games that he played in and registered a team-high seven pass breakups in addition to 59 total tackles and an interception. Stanford in 2013 won the Pac-12 title.

If you’ve been around Loudoun County high school football for any length of time, then you know who Adam Fortune is. He was an assistant coach at Broad Run during their championship years under head coach Mike Burnett, then followed Burnett over to Tuscarora to build that program.

Today, according to reports on Twitter and emails I’ve gotten from a friend and former player, Fortune passed away.

I can’t say I knew Adam well, so I’m not going to pretend I did. But I always enjoyed watching a team warm up in preparation for a game, and it always seemed like the good teams had two key coaches. One was the head coach, who was more of the general manager; the other was the intense, get-in-your-face, we’re-going-to-win-tonight guy the players loved and responded to. That was Adam Fortune.

Yeah, we're cheap when it comes finding deals on fast food (if you have not gotten the McDonald's App for your Iphone, for example, you might as well go to the nearest storm drain and dump a handful of dollars into it because the deals are pretty good and you're wasting your money without it). So here's a heads up on a deal for tomorrow at IHOP.

Tomorrow marks the 56th anniversary of when the first International House Of Pancakes was opened in California, so from 7AM to 7 PM Tuesday, participating IHOP restaurants around the country will be offering a short stack of their world famous buttermilk pancakes for just 56 cents. That's almost nothing. And according to the folks at Channel 11 in Little Rock, Arkansas, it IS nothing. I got the info for this from their website after doing a Google search, and even though the number "56" is in multiple places, the headline still says "Celebrate IHOP's Birthday With FREE Pancakes."

In an all-star game, you try to make sure every team is represented, so every team usually has one person picked. If you only get one person picked, it means you’re the nerd kid at the prom. You were asked, but more out of sympathy than “we really, really want you here.” Not surprisingly, usually the teams that only have one player picked aren’t very good.

Which brings us to OUR nerd kid at the prom, the Washington Nationals. Only one player – pitcher Jordan Zimmermann – has been picked for the summer classic from the most powerful city in the world. Not even an every-day player. A pitcher.